Francoise von Trapp (aka the Queen of 3D) has been following and reporting on the progress of 3D integration technologies since 2009. Francoise in 3D provides a high-level perspective of 3D industry events, offers executive viewpoints, and focuses on process and manufacturing aspects of 3D integration.
Well, I missed half of Monday's activities at SEMICON West thanks to a two hour flight delay. I skidded into the imec ITF just in time to catch the tail end of Luc Van den hove's technology overview. He was saying that the requirements of smart devices communicating with the Cloud...
A few months ago, Andreas Fischer, of the Microsystem Technology Laboratory School of Electrical Engineering Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, contacted me to tell me about a novel process for filling TSVs that he had been working on from first proof of concept in August 2008, as part of...
We’ve been hearing and reading a lot about work being done at Georgia Tech’s PRC in developing glass interposer technologies as a low-cost alternative to silicon in 2.D and 3D applications. Mostly, it’s the cost benefits that are being touted. However, what sort of journalist would I be if I didn’t...
I listened in on yesterday’s webcast, 3D and 2.5D Integration: A Status Report Live Event hosted by Solid State Technology, and while most of the information was similar to what I had heard at IMAPS Device Packaging Conference, EDPS, ECTC 2012, etc., they are clearly messages worth repeating, and some...
So here I am in Honolulu with my family, celebrating the return of my nephew from a 6 month deployment on a nuclear submarine, and I realize that the co-located IEEE Symposia on VLSI Technology and IEEE Symposia on VLSI Circuits is taking place at the SAME TIME, and there's...
Wow, times have changed. Who would have thought the foundries would ever willingly turn to the packaging industry for the solutions to future scaling? But I heard it myself yesterday at the ECTC luncheon keynote address, straight from the lips of Global Foundries’ CTO Greg Bartlett, who said that “silicon is not a...
ECTC sure knew how to pack ‘em in early this year! It was no accident that they held a special session on the Transforming Role of the Packaging Foundry on the Professional Development Course Day (Tuesday, May 29). Instead of 30 or so stragglers who wandered in between their regular...
I’m thinking about becoming a curator. Not as in the career-changing, get-a-job-at-an-art-gallery sense, but in the curation-vs-aggregation sense. I was recently asked to beta test a new web site, SolarCurator, built on the concept of content curation. The site just went live a couple weeks ago, and features the editorial...
In the May 15 issue of Future Fab News!, Aaron Hand, contributing editor, asked for opinions on Mark Bohr’s (Intel) now famous EE Times interview, with Rick Merritt, where he said the fabless model is collapsing and a return to the IDM is inevitable. (I addressed a similar topic a...
Want to know how to torture a journalist? Invite them to present at a conference but ask them to sign an NDA so they can’t write about it! However, I can say this much: the 3D Program is alive and well at IBM. From IBM Fellow, Subramanian Iyer, I learned...
